Software Review

Chameleon 5.0.881M Legacy

In my family, my second older sister is the traveler. She has visited
many US states and most countries in Europe, including some in the
former Communist Bloc. She has photos of herself in front of many famous
places, like the Tower of Pisa and Stonehenge. On the other hand, my
travel is limited to a few big cities around the world. To have photos
of myself in front of many monuments, I would need to use software like
Chameleon from AKVIS.

Installation

Chameleon is a Photoshop plug-in, and as such installation varies
slightly from the typical process. After mounting the image, instead of
copying the one file to anywhere in the hard drive, the file has to be
placed in the plug-in folder inside the Photoshop folder. There is one
version of Chameleon for Photoshop CS3 and above and another version for
CS2 and lower and Photoshop Elements. To use the program beyond its
10-day trial period, you need to visit the AKVIS Web site to buy a
serial number and enter it through the About window.

Cut It Out

One popular use of Photoshop is copying a person from one photo into
another. Select the person from the first photo, copy the selection to
the clipboard, then go to the second photo and paste. Sounds easy, but
the selection process can be daunting. There are a few ways to select
the person. There are also chapters in books that focus on the different
selection tools because selection is a skill to be acquired with
practice.

My favorite selection tool is the magnetic lasso. As with the regular
lasso, you can make a free-form selection. The magnetic feature of the
tool means that as you trace your person’s outline, the line
intelligently attaches it to the person based on color differences
between the person and the background. Still, with or without the
magnetic lasso, making selections is difficult. Usually, a selection
must be made in multiple stages, adding with the Shift key or
subtracting with the Option key as you zoom in and out or move within
the picture.

Blue Means Keep, Red Means Drop

With the Chameleon plug-in, transferring a cut-out of a person from one
photo to another is painlessly easy. I used Chameleon to transfer my son
Justin from photo A to photo B.

A: Justin making an impression of a monkey.

B: The entrance to the Butterfly Valley in Hainan Island,
China.

First, I roughly select the person with the rectangular marquee tool.
Don’t worry that the background is included, just be sure that the
entire person is inside the marquee. Instead of using the standard
Photoshop Copy command, select Filter ‣ AKVIS ‣ Chameleon—Grab Fragment.
Chameleon acknowledges the action by displaying a window indicating that the
fragment was saved successfully. Next, go to the second photo and select
Filter ‣ AKVIS ‣ Chameleon—Make Collage.

Select the person with the simplest tool.

The following screenshot shows both the Chameleon user interface and
what a fragment looks like after it has been completely selected. The
interface has few options so you don’t get overwhelmed. As you pick the
different buttons and menus, the online help in the lower right corner
is updated to tell you what the item does. In this case, I am in the
Montage mode to have Justin added to the picture with a sharp outline,
rather than blend into the surrounding. I already used the blue pen to
roughly outline the parts that I wanted to keep. I also used the red pen
to, again, roughly determine the parts that I wanted to omit. Note that
the blue line is within the person’s outline. Similarly, the red line is
slightly outside of Justin’s shape. It is not necessary to draw either
line close to the person, as that is Chameleon’s job.

Chameleon’s simple interface.

From faraway, the red and blue lines appear to be broken in places, but
they are in fact contiguous, as the close-up below shows. Well, at least
the red line is contiguous, as I purposely left a gap in the blue line,
near Justin’s left shoulder. Drawing the lines was very easy. I just
draw a segment, zoom in or out as needed, and pick up again without
having to use any modifier keys. Chameleon did not try to help by
completing any unfinished loops. If I made a mistake, I would erase it
with the eraser tool. Infinite undo and redo are just a click away.

Red means drop, blue means keep.

When I clicked the green “play” button in the upper right corner, Chameleon
started working on the image. The result is the picture above, which, at
first glance, is not bad at all. I did not exactly time the process, but
I am sure it would have taken me much more time had I tried the same
thing with my trusty magnetic lasso. Chameleon was able to work with the
blue line even though I purposely left a gap in it.

Not a bad collage. It certainly took me less time to make the
collage.

Imperfections

While making the outlines, I thought the marble part of the statue
behind Justin would confuse Chameleon’s color computation. With Justin’s
left hand covering part of the marble, how would Chameleon tell where
the skin ends? Surprisingly, perhaps because of the white glow outlining
the hand, that part of Justin came out fine in the collage. However, the
gray monkey statue behind his black hair did throw Chameleon off the
track. Also, behind his right arm the background is not so uniform, with
green plants overlapping some brownish steps.

The Chameleon demo video cleverly uses a
model dressed completely in white and with platinum blonde hair. Behind
her is a wooden boat that is definitely not white. Similarly, the photo-hunting
tutorial in Chameleon’s PDF documentation has a boy squatting on
gravel with not much else in his background. These examples show that
Chameleon works best when the foreground object does not already blend
in with the background.

Background and foreground of similar color can fool Chameleon.

That is not to say that Chameleon cannot be tweaked to achieve a better
outcome. I redrew the blue and red lines around Justin’s head and right
forearm closer to the border between the foreground and background. The
result is much better, although some undesirable artifacts remain around
the head.

Fewer spiking hairs and a more natural right forearm.

Some “hair” still spikes from the subject’s head.

The Downsides

The one and only bug I found with Chameleon is that every time I load a
saved outline fragment, the program crashes. This serious bug means that
I must do all the work in one sitting. Saving a fragment to continue the
work later is useless because such saved fragment cannot be loaded at
all. I wrote to AKVIS and then sent them a copy of the saved
fragments that failed to load. I have been informed that AKVIS
programmers will fix this bug in the future.

Making collages with Chameleon is nice, but once you apply the effect,
you end up with a flat file. There is no layer to further manipulate. I
am so used to Photoshop’s Layer feature that I cannot help wishing that
Chameleon would create a new layer as the final product. I suppose you
trade ease of use for limited power.

Besides the Montage mode, Chameleon has two more modes, Chameleon and
Blend. Whereas in Montage mode the fragment retains its sharp outline,
in Chameleon mode the fragment’s edge is softened to merge with the
surrounding. The Blend mode takes it further by blending the entire
fragment into the background. I am not too impressed with both modes, as
what they do can also be done with Photoshop’s native Layer Opacity. The
tutorials for these modes mention making use of the magic wand selection and
other seemingly advanced selection methods. They seem to contrast
Montage mode’s dead-easy rough-selection method.

Chameleon Mode

Blend Mode

Verdict

At $75, AKVIS Chameleon is not cheap. It may be a fraction of the price
of the full Photoshop, but compared to Photoshop Elements it costs
almost the same as the host application. With Chameleon’s Montage mode,
you can easily cut pieces of one photo and make it look as if they belong
in a second photo. Montage is not perfect and works best when the
foreground object stands out from the background, but it is still a big
time saver in many scenarios. I don’t find the Chameleon and Blend modes
too impressive, but some beginner Photoshop users may find them useful.
If it were not for the issue with crashing upon loading saved fragments,
I would rate AKVIS Chameleon as Very Nice, but for now the best it can
garner is Good.